Faliszek, ‘60% of Kickstarter games will launch’

Valve’s Chet Faliszek has predicted to VG247 that only 60% of successfully funded Kickstarter projects will see the light of day. Although the developer has personally funded a lot of Kickstarter projects himself, he has warned of the potential dangers of the crowd-sourcing method.

“I’ve funded a lot of things on Kickstarter,” Faliszek told us in our interview, “I figure 60% of these projects will actually create something by the end, and I’m fine with that. It’s going to be interesting for projects that take a long time, for teams that aren’t as experienced, seeing what people think, and to see what’s going to happen two or three years from now.”

“Are they actually going to deliver and come through with it?” Faliszek mused, “So yeah, that will be interesting to see. But I do hope that it maintains being a viable way, because I love being able to see people saying, ‘yeah, I’m just going to do this project.’”

Faliszek has recently hosted a number of lectures that discuss ways in which aspiring game developers can break into the games industry, and he firmly believes that you don’t have to make a full game to be successful.

“You can make things in Steam Workshop,” he continued, “People laugh when I say that, but it’s like, people have earned six-figure incomes by doing that. We’ve given millions of dollars to people, so that’s a viable way to go about getting into the games industry.”

“Then of course the indie scene – what’s happening there right now is powerful, because it’s giving so many people opportunities, and fuelling more people to do that,” he added.

Valve has also recently launched Steam Greenlight, a platform for developers to submit their titles for community approval on the store. Faliszek urges anyone who thinks they have made a solid indie game to come forward and make themselves known.

“That just came out of a necessity as we were getting very backlogged with requests,” Faliszek said of Greenlight, “It’s hard because we never know if we’re making a bad choice or not in accepting games on to Steam.”

“If someone wants to be on Steam they can say, ‘hey guys check this game out, it really should be on Steam, it’s awesome.’ We’re always going to be missing things when people aren’t submitting their games but should be, so Greenlight just makes it a very open choice as it’s the community that decides.”

Do you agree with Faliszek’s comments? Let us know below.

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